The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History by J. R. McNeill and William McNeill. 

Prompt Passages:

Teachable Moments from The Human Web (View or print as PDF.)
(Todd Tash, Ross School, 6th grade toddtash@aol.com )

Topic: SLAVERY

• Essential Question: How does slavery affect a culture pr civilization and the webs they share with others?
• Sub-Questions: What is slavery? What factors are needed to make slavery viable? How long has slavery existed?
• Quote: "The Slave trade's impact on Africa was mainly indirect. The 25 million enslaved over 400 years accounted for a very small (but knowable) share of the population." Pg. 170

Topic: THE CONQUERING OF MESOAMERICA BY EUROPEANS

• Essential Question: Why did the Aztecs and Incas fall relatively quickly to the Spaniards?
• Sub-Questions: Why do cultures or civilizations succumb to outsiders? What factors make a civilization vulnerable to outside attack? Which is easier to conquer: an organized civilization or disorganized countryside?
• Quote: "Where no unified empire had existed, as in most of North America, Central America, Brazil, and the "southern cone" of South America, the extension of the web proceeds more slowly." Pg. 172

Topic: THE ADVENT OF PRINTING

• Essential Question: Why did the invention of printing spread more rapidly in Europe than in East Asia?
• Sub-Questions: Who first invented the printing press and where? Why would a civilized society not welcome the advent of printing? What social changes are possible with the availability of freedom of the press and the technology to make it widespread? Compare and contrast changes of Europe and China after the inventions of moveable printing type.
• Quote: "Around 1430 a metalworker in Mainz (Germany), Johannes Gutenberg, started working on casting type for use in printing." Pg. 179
  "Koreans had invented moveable metal type in the thirteenth century." Pg. 180

Topic: THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

• Essential Question: Why did science blossom more readily in Europe than elsewhere? Is this a factor to explain modern-day's western dominance of politics and economics?
• Sub-Questions: What factors fertilize a society for intellectual growth and openness? How would the existence of a more domesticated animals aid in a culture's rise in wealth?
• Quote: "Hence Europeans alone developed a culture of scientific inquiry that after 1500 provided immense practical knowledge." Pg. 189

Topic: ENERGY AND FOSSIL FUEL USE

• Essential Question: What influences does increased energy use have upon a culture or civilization?
• Sub-Questions: What motivates the use of fossil fuels? How has the harnessing of fossil fuels affected life on earth?
• Quote: "The harnessing of fossil fuels, like the transition to agricultural a hundred centuries before, ratcheted up energy supplies available for human use, thereby permitting a vast increase in human numbers and wealth." Pg. 232
  

Other useful passages discussed in class:
Of revolution:
"The French Revolution in particular had also advanced the notion that sovereignty rests on the consent of the governed, that the state is the expression of the will of the people…In France it proved practical as a basis for a new type pf army, the nation-in-arms" - new at least in Europe…When combined with masterly organization, a skill Napoleon had in full measure, this mass army proved a formidable instrument of land warfare. It also helped forge a collective consciousness, a sense of nationhood, among the French, who in 1790 were a diverse lot." (page 227)

"It was not until about 1950 that the principle of representative government became so generally accepted that almost every polity at least pretended to adhere to it." (page 229)

Of nationalism:
"Nationalism, the sense of solidarity among people who believe themselves to comprise a nation, could make the art of government a lot easier. In this respect, it served as religions has long done, reconciling the ruled to their fate. Where the entire population shared the attributes held to distinguish a nation -- usually language and culture, but in some cases supposed ancestry -- the state could easily portray itself as the embodiment of the nation. Thoughtful governments used military service, mass education (especially heroic and nationalist history lessons), and patriotic literature to instill nationalist sentiments; drama, music, museums, marches, and ritual celebrations carried the message to the unlettered. People almost everywhere, especially city fold and educated classes, proved enormously responsive to the lure of nationalism. It made people feel part of something larger and nobler than their families and parishes…" (pages 227-228)

"It (nationalism) helped upset the world political order. First, nationalism conferred greater power on those states that could marshal it in their service. This meant those where borders of language and culture coincided neatly with political ones -- such as Japan. But it also applied to those where political borders could be adjusted to accommodate emerging senses of nationality, such as Italy and Germany, which became powerful states through diplomacy and small-scale wars between 1859 and 1871. France and Britain also benefited from nationalism once their linguistic and cultural diversity were suppressed, a project that in both cases took a century or more. After the Civil War, free schooling and an appealing political ideology of freedom made nationalism work in the United States, despite its ethnic and religious diversity." (page 228)

Of conditions before the Russian Revolution:
"Emancipation in Russia dwarfed all the slave emancipations put together. Although Russia did have slaves, its chief form of forced labor was serfdom. In the late 1700s, the position of Russian serfs deteriorated and came to approximate that of slaves. They were the legal property of landowners or the state. They were subjected to brutal discipline. They could be bought and sold as individuals, families, or as entire villages. They married when and whom their owners chose. In Russian in 1797 there were about 20 million serfs owned privately, and another 14-15 million state peasants owned by the government, whose lives were somewhat more free but subject to frequent labor conscription. Most state peasants worked in the fields, some in forests or mines, a very few in cities." (page 255)

Lesson ideas:

The Human Web
A Lesson by Barbara Loften, Valley View Middle School, b.loften@comcast.net
(print or view as PDF file)

Goal: To help make the webs of connections relevant for middle school students

Objectives:

1. To help students see the ever increasing interdependency of people and nations to one another.
2. To be able to organize the events from one web in chronological order.
3. To be able to recognize and record events from a different web, and put them in chronological order.
4. To use imagination working within the theme of the web, to extrapolate what might have happened if a particular web had been broke in just one place.

Materials: The text and lecture notes, large chart paper, 3 x 5 index cards, yarn, scissors

Doing the Activity:

1. Divide students into groups of ten and give each group a set of ten cards. Each card lists an event, or consequence of a preceding event. Give each student one of the cards for their group. (See sample cards below.)
   
2. Ask the students to try to stand in a line arranged chronologically according to the fact on their 3 x 5 card.
3. Give each student a length of yarn.
4. Have them build a web of yarn according to the facts they have been given.

Going Further:
Extension idea #1 - Students Identify the How and Where the Points of a New Web Intersect
1. Ask students to choose a chapter that deals with another totally different web.
2. Have each group of ten use the chart paper to identify ten events or consequences and put them on the chart paper creating a new web design. Also put each event on a 3 x 5 card.
3. These new events or fact cards could be given to a new group to see if using the yarn they can construct a new web.

Extension Idea # 2 - Slicing the Web and Extrapolating the Consequences to Build an Imaginary New Web (What could have happened if this one event or thing did not take place)
1. This would be one of the highest levels of thinking on Bloom's Taxonomy. Students would have to be very cognizant of how web theory works and be able to imagine possible realistic and different outcomes based on a different chain of events or on a broken chain of events.

Sample Set of Ten or Twelve Cards

• Building sturdier ships capable of carrying plentiful heavy cannon
• Increased navigational knowledge and skills
• Low transport and information costs
• Increased specialization of labor
• Epidemiological formidable societies
• Unification of the world's coastlines to fit the needs of passing ships
• Increase in size and significance of the slave trade
• The slave trade encouraged the creation and expansion of states
• Muslim law forbids the enslavement of believers
• North and South America quickly brought into the web especially where Europeans found unified empires that could be overtaken through military conquest.
• Maybe as much as 90% of the Amerindian population was lost to repeated epidemics
• Territorial economies run by Europeans or people of European descent. They were literate and had greater knowledge of global markets and political conditions

Vocabulary:

• nationalism - a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups (merriam-webster)
• autarky (p.321) - national economic self-sufficiency and independence
• demographic transition (p. 222) - death rates decline first, followed at some interval by a fall in birth rates, ultimately reaching a point where the rates are in rough balance again and population growth (or loss) is again slow. But during that interval population grows very rapidly.
• Lamarckian cultural evolution (321)- acquired traits and skills can be passed on over generations
• Mongols of the sea - (Atlantic Europeans)
• "nation of tinkerers" - England (industrialized)

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Michele Delattre, ORIAS: orias@uclink4.berkeley.edu (510.643.0868)
Mary Jo Wainwright, BAGEP: MWainwright@wacsf.org (415.293.4655)
Alan Karras, IASTP: karras@socrates.Berkeley.EDU (510.643-3185)

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This series is funded by Title VI  from the U. S. Department of Education and the Bay Area Global Education Program at the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

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